Slashdot Mirror
Galileo Amalthea Flyby Threatened
vince writes "The Galileo spacecraft will fly by Jupiter's moon Amalthea on November 5th. This is the *only* close flyby of this moon Galileo will make, but (as currently planned) it will not return any images, in order to save a paltry $1m - $1.5m. Looks like a grassroots campaign is going to be necessary to save the flyby."
1.5 million keeps the full science team on salary for a year, plus buys all of the associated frills. Seems pretty sad to me - they could get decent shots of Amalthea with a few hours of work by the techs who actually do the trajectory and camera pointing work, but that doesn't fall within established protocols.
Feh. If NASA falls prey to that kind of pointy-headed desk-jockey thinking, then I suspect the glory days may really be behind them.
Why are we building the International Space Station?
Good question. Personally, I think all current official justifications of the space program are pretty weak. The only long term goal of the space program is should be very simple. The eventual self-sufficient colonization of the rest of the solar system, and subsequently extra-solar planets.
The current justification for the space station is weak, it should be called what it is and the majority of the work should be focused on the end goal. Any additional science is gravy. The space station is a stepping stone, the next step is the moon. Which requires thorough robotic exploration in order to locate materials suitable for use in developing human habitation (food, water), spacecraft fuel, and building material.
From the moon you build and launch additional spacecraft for shuttling between the space station and the moon. You also build the craft for exploring, exploiting, and eventually colonizing other locations in the solar system.
Once we can self sufficiently colonize locations in this solar system, the next (and much more difficult) step is to find other solar systems to colonize. The first job will be finding systems with the raw materials for human colonization. Then, barring discovery of FTL, we will need to turn a large asteroid, or conglomeration of asteroids (i.e. icy, rocky, metallic) into a colonyship with a nuclear(fission or fusion) energy source, machines and equipment, and enough people to maintain a population for the lifetimes it will take to get to another system, and begin exploiting the resources available to do the same things we did in our solar system.
Can this happen soon? Not a chance, it is the project of multiple lifetimes. But, each step is simply an evolution of what was done before, and is definitely possible. The key to everything is the moon, it is a nearby source of raw materials with low gravity, launching stuff form the moon is a hell of a lot easier than from earth. Eventually, the only thing you would want launched from earth are people and light stuff.
Dastardly
Actually, small moons aren't interesting. Well, not in the same way and to the same degree as the Galilean moons. The Galilean moons are large enough to be spherical and to show geological processes and to hold on to trace atmospheres. That means there is probably much more to study with them than with the smaller moons, which have little geology aside from impact cratering. This is not meant to be a value judgement, merely an unfortunate pragmatic fact.
Mission planners also undoubted considered some basic orbital facts, here. The small moons of Jupiter are all either quite a bit outside the Gailean orbits or within Io's orbit. You might think you could sneak visits to the former as the probe swings out from or in to Jupiter on its very elliptical orbit. But ALL of the outer moons have signficant inclinations. The odds of meeting one of them near the equator of Jupiter is slight, given the number of coincidences you'd need. As for the inner moons (Amalthea, Phoebe, Adrestea and Metis), they're all interior to Io. This is actually very bad for Galileo. You'll recall that getting in as close to Jupiter as Io has causes problems, thanks to the magnetosphereic plasma. The farther in you go, the worse it gets. They're only doing this now because Galileo is well past its life expectency and beginning to fail anyway.
I agree!
I am sick of that space station sucking up all the science money.
It is the first black hole ever witnessed up close by humans. A money-hole that is.
Table-ized A.I.
One can't help thinking that it is a great pity that the question of one million dollars is going to block a 'photo opportunity' that might be otherwise be decades off.
It is true that Amalthea probably is a quite boring, small rock and there isn't much of scientific interest there but if we don't take the chance and get the data while we have a space probe out there then we mis opportunity to be surprised. Science involves a fair amount of "stamp collection" or "botany". A set of photos from Amalthea would fit in nicely here.
--
virve
Seems a pity not to rereview squeezing as much as possible out of what may well be this impressive craft's last pass through the inner reaches of the Jovian system. On the other hand, just a rereview would probably eat up another $1M :(
Because there are no comfortable parking orbits in the Jovian system. There are too many bodies to provide a system we can solve over longer-term. (For a Jovian orbit, that means say a few hundred orbits. Each orbits is of order days, so we're talking a few years.) Beyond any short term, the perturbations to the orbit add up and thanks to the chaotic nature of the orbits, we lose the ability to predict where Galileo will be. Thanks to an almost non-existant fuel supply, nothing can be done to prevent this.
So we lose control of the orbit, so what? So what is that they don't want it to crash into a moon like Europa. While the RTG is relatively safe, it's still warm and would probably work its way down through the ice, saith NASA analysts. (Even if it doesn't, there is a fair chance that the anything on the surface will eventually end up inside the moon.) Once inside, there is the risk of contaminating the moon with not only the radioactive plutonium but also any terrestrial microorganisms that might be left on Galileo. (The spacecraft was not cleaned to the levels that would be required of a lander.) Either way, that runs the risk of contaiminating the whole moon.
Is the risk small? Yes. But the last thing anyone wants is to ruin any extraterrestrial ecosystems for study. Once you contaminate them, all subsequent research is going to be of questionable value.
There is also the risk that Galileo could be ejcted from the system. This has the potential to be bad, as well, as it could (very long term, admittedly) come back and smack Earth. I know, low probability. I was incredulous when I heard the NASA folks worry about that, but it is a risk. And so that's why they're not getting it out of Jupiter orbit, in fact.
Ultimately, I suspect that everyone at NASA would dearly love to save poor Galileo. It's been a trooper and deserves to be enshrined in the Smithsonian. (No offense, but given the choice between that and a few tons of scrap metal and outdate technology, I'd pray they'd bring it home.) But the risks, small though they are, are deemed too great.